


Under the Eaves

by scioscribe



Category: True Detective
Genre: Caretaking, Disability, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Old Age, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-02-10 05:42:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18654079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: He was forgetting something.  It was missing and he couldn’t even feel where it was supposed to be.  It was like finding out you'd lost a tooth just by looking at the mark you’d made biting into an apple, when your mouth itself felt the same.Could be, he thought, that Roland was the apple.  The things he remembered about everything he couldn’t remember—they would seem to indicate that.





	Under the Eaves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).



_2015_

Wayne came into the kitchen and found Roland making lemonade, doing it the old-fashioned way, squeezing out lemons and stirring in sugar.  He was using an old pitcher he must’ve dug out of the cabinet, one made out of blue glass and covered with all kinds of little points so it felt rough beneath your hands.

Big chip gone from the pitcher’s lip; Wayne didn’t remember how that had happened or why he hadn’t thrown it out afterwards.  Fresh cut on Roland’s hand, and he didn’t remember that either.  He watched Roland being careful not to get lemon juice flicked back on him there, watched him trying to avoid the sting.

Roland looked up and saw him and his face crinkled into a smile.  “Hey, Purple.  Thought we could take this out on the porch.  Play up being old men.”

Everything they’d been through together and everything they didn’t, all those years apart, and he had trouble believing that Roland wasn’t angry with him still.  But evidently Roland did do things even knowing he might get stung.

He liked being old with Roland, is the thing.  He hadn’t always been so good at being young with him.

Wayne said, “Don’t put too much sugar in there.”

“Seeing as I’m the one making it, I’ll put in however much sugar I want and assume that’s the right amount.”

He heard his voice, straight out of the past, sharp as vinegar: “Not everybody wants what you want.”  It wasn’t anything he was saying now.

Some shit, Wayne thought, he didn’t want to remember.

They went out and drank their lemonade on the porch.  Hot sun all around them like golden syrup, sticky and slowing down the day.  The lemonade was just right.

“How’d you get that cut?” Wayne said, nodding at Roland’s hand.

There was never any telling from how Roland answered him if it was the first time he’d asked the question or not, if he ought to know already or not.  “Shit,” Roland had said the one time Wayne had asked him about that.  “I like repeating myself.”

“Thought I’d diversify,” Roland was saying now.  “Tried to pick up a stray cat, bring her home to class the place up a little.  She had opinions.”  He took another long drink, but there was nothing left in his glass but ice.  The cut had opened back up again.

Wayne watched a drop of blood creep insect-slow down the side of Roland’s hand.  “I could doctor that up for you.”

“This?  It’s nothing.  It’s a Band-Aid, man.”  Roland rose and left, knocking his uninjured hand against Wayne’s chair as he went by.

Somebody else might have patted his shoulder.  But touch between them had never been easy—hell, _they_ had never been easy, never effortlessly in tune.  People had never come easily to Wayne; they were like some language he’d only ever picked up the reading of.  He could understand them, peel back the layers of them, even, but he couldn’t talk the way they talked, couldn’t want the things they wanted.  Couldn’t make himself understood.

But this was more than that.  He was forgetting something.  It was missing and he couldn’t even feel where it was supposed to be.  It was like finding out you'd lost a tooth just by looking at the mark you’d made biting into an apple, when your mouth itself felt the same.

Could be, he thought, that Roland was the apple.  The things he remembered about everything he couldn’t remember—they would seem to indicate that.

Maybe he ought to let it go.  But these days his mind was adept at throwing the wrong memories at him, especially when on the nights—fewer and fewer now—when Roland wasn’t there.  When he was trying to sleep and he knew the rest of the house was empty and it was just him, the hum of the fridge, and the creak of the doorjambs swelling in the heat.  He had holes in his mind and at night he fell into them.  It was either that or paper over them with fantasies, and he wasn’t inclined that way.

 

_1980_

“You don’t have to stick around, you know,” Roland said.  He leaned his crutches up against the couch.

“You telling me I’m supposed to go away and miss you tripping all over shit?”  Wayne said it lightly.  He didn’t dig in his heels with Roland and get all earnest with him unless they were arguing, usually; somehow it always felt like it would lay too much bare.

Like now.  He didn’t want to get into all the things he’d noticed: how gray Roland’s face got when there was still half an hour before the nurse would bring the next pill around for him, the way the pain hooked his mouth rigid and dug crow’s feet deep into the corners of his eyes, the way he thumped his crutches hard against the rugs and stirred up dust.  The truth was that Roland was highlighted for him, all of him run over with a yellow marker, every detail picked out.  It’d be wrong to get into that.

They didn’t talk about what had happened between them out at the barn.  Wayne did his best to pretend he never thought about it, like he’d been too drunk to even keep it in his head.  In 1980, all his memory problems were still self-inflicted.

Now Roland was saying, “Well, I don’t want to hear any bitching if I wind up stomping one of these on your foot.”  He twitched one of the crutches at Wayne.  “I don’t want to be on them long enough to get adept.”

“Doctors kept saying you were lucky to have the leg.”

“Luck’s relative,” Roland said.  “I guess I’m lucky I got you.”

Wayne’s face warmed.  He turned away and unpacked Roland’s bag from the hospital.  More details there, noted with an investigator’s eye: the thin, butter-soft fabric of one of those undershirts, white worn almost translucent.  Leather shaving case.  Stephen King novel.

“I never did have much in the way of people,” Roland said.  His voice had drooped a little, slack with exhaustion.

“And here you’re so likable,” Wayne said.

“Fuck you, Purple.  I’m trying to say thank you.”

“And I’m trying to say that being thanked for something this easy’s close to an insult.”

“Well,” Roland said, almost smiling, “all right, then.  Give me another one of those Vicodin, will you?  This thing aches like a rotten tooth.”

“Your redneck’s showing,” Wayne said, “you knowing what a rotten tooth feels like,” but he found the bottle and passed it over, got Roland an inch or two of water to swallow it down.  Roland had those jelly jar glasses, the ones with the Flintstones on them.

“I can see you judging those,” Roland said, “but, you know, they don’t make them anymore.  That makes them practically heirlooms.”

“Garage sale price sticker’s on the base of that one.  Ten cents.”

“Damn right.  A good deal.  Motherfucker, you read comic books, you don’t have any business laying into me about what I keep in my kitchen cabinets.”  He drained the glass and put it aside, setting it down to spread out a water stain on his magazine.  “I’ll be loopy in a bit from that.  You be sure not to take advantage.”  He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, wiping it dry.

Wayne looked at the shimmer the water left on Roland’s skin.  “I’ll try to restrain myself.”

“Just don’t go to too much trouble.”  Roland closed his eyes.  “I wouldn’t want to feel like you didn’t want me at all.”

_2015_

 

The third or fourth time Roland called it the guest room, Wayne said, “How many times you have to sleep somewhere before you start calling it yours?”

“Now that feels like a relationship kind of question,” Roland said.  “Like how many times do you screw before you’ve really got to put a name to it.”

The trouble with Roland was he’d only talk about what he wanted to talk about.  That was the trouble with Wayne himself too, now that he thought about it.  One of the troubles, anyhow.  Roland would do shit he didn’t want to do, even shit that he knew will fuck with his head and with his conscience, but he wouldn’t have a conversation about it.

Well, they could match each other for stubbornness.

Wayne said, “It’s your room.”

“For a couple of nights, sure.”

“It’s your room all the time,” Wayne said.  “If you weren’t here and I needed something moved in there, I’d say, ‘Put it in Roland’s room.’”

Roland’s mouth twitched.  “If it’s my room, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to move shit in there when I’m not around.”

Wayne said, “Then we can shake on it,” and he took Roland’s hand.

It didn’t feel like a handshake, even though it was in the shape of one.  It was more like _holding_ hands—doing it as a kid, even, back when that kind of thing had big enough you could see it from space.  Like a spotlight was coming down on you.

That wasn’t from how way Roland’s hand felt in his, exactly, though it felt good.  Warm, sturdy, callused as ever from the work of dealing with those dogs of his, those dogs of theirs.  It was the way Roland’s face looked.  How it almost crumbled.  Wayne stroked his thumb over the newly-bandaged scratch against Roland’s knuckles.

They had so much time between them, on them.  This shit felt geological—avalanches, excavations, glacial change.

Roland detached himself.  “Sorry, man.”  His voice shook, half with embarrassment and half with something else.  “It’s been a while since—I don’t know.  People.”

It made him think of Freddy Burns.  He hadn’t asked Roland to forsake all human companionship.

Then again, what he’d asked of Roland wasn’t much better.  _Let me go.  Stay away from me.  Kill a man with me, bury him and go the whole rest of your life with the ache of that shovel in your hands.  Dig all those memories up again._

He hadn’t asked Roland to take care of him, either.  But Roland was good at it.  He always had been.

Wayne pushed everything else aside and took up the best parts of himself—what was left of them, anyway.  He hugged Roland.

Wayne had all the height in the world on him, it felt like.  Roland leaned into him, his forehead against Wayne’s shoulder.  All those years holding dogs, that bedraggled little one in particular.  Roland had been used to being the one doing the looking after.  But it was good to have a chance to be small, Wayne had learned.  Everybody needed more power and everybody needed less.

And he needed Roland and Roland needed him.  Roland’s hands were against his back now, tight against his shoulder-blades.  The man had spent too much time out there in the wilderness he’d never wanted.  Wayne wanted him to come in.  To come home.

“It’s your house too,” he said.  “Hell, we’ve already got a kennel out back for your damn dogs.”

_1979_

 

The first time they fooled around, really and truly, it was out at the barn, where they got up to all their mischief, all their deeds they knew they shouldn’t ever let come to light.

They were drinking there that night instead of out of at the junkyard, and that little change of venue had been Wayne’s idea.  He had the feeling he’d gotten sometimes in the jungle, when he’d seen trouble out ahead of him, small and tight like he was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.  He was the kind to go towards trouble he was sure he could handle.

He had felt something brewing between him and Roland for a while now.  Those inclinations—that way of looking at another man—had never been much of a part of him before.  He thought he could get it out of his system.  Do what you could call a controlled burn.

That night, they were in tune with each other, or so it seemed at the time.

Roland drummed his fingers against the cheap plastic arm of his lawn chair.  He’d loosened his tie and undone the first button of his shirt.

Wayne wanted to redden that newly bared skin, and the intensity of that wanting made his hand tighten around his bottle of beer.

“Could have gone to Miss Minnie’s,” Roland said after a moment.  Like he was presenting a whole road not taken that he thought Wayne might not have even considered.  He waited a second and when Wayne said nothing, Roland shrugged.  “But then there’s your romantic side, Purple.  What you’ll do and what you won’t.”

“I guess.”

“Well, you don’t got to pay me, man.”  Roland’s eyes were on the opposite wall of the barn, on the haylofts that looked gray in the dark.  “So if that’s the only scruple you got rattling around, fucking our night up, I guess I could always take care of you.  You like that?”

The boundaries of it all were liquor-fuzzy, but not so much as Wayne would have liked: he should have drunk more and he should have drunk faster.

“I’d like it,” Roland said.

Wayne made himself answer.  “Then I don’t want to get in the way of your fun.”

“Hell no.  Why should you?”

So it happened like that: Roland got down on his knees in the dust and straw and sucked him off slow and sloppy.  He did it like a man who’d done it before but who wanted it too badly right then to do his best at it.  That had made it better, somehow—the guilelessness of Roland’s mouth on him, hot and needy.  Wayne tugged his hair.

And sooner or later he jerked him off, too, Roland’s cock silky and hard in his hand, foreign and familiar at the same time.

_2015_

Wayne found himself in the doorway of Roland’s room.  “Roland, you asleep?”

Roland turned over on his side, rubs his eyes.  “No.  I don’t sleep much anymore.  Too fucking old.  Plus I’ve got this fucker who keeps coming and standing in my doorway.”

“I did this before?”

“No.  I was trying to be funny.  Trying and failing.  What’s going on, Purple?”

Too much.  Lemonade and cat-scratches and Roland seeing to his own hurts.  He wasn’t sure how long ago that had been.  Then there was that fumble in the barn and the feel of the hot vinyl straps of the lawn chairs they’d been sitting on.  Letting the fox go, the night Will Purcell and Steve McQueen both died, like something ought to live, something ought to keep on living, something beautiful like that.  It ought to have its time.  A thing had its time, all of time.  And that kiss.  Teeth-marks in an apple and Roland shaking a little in his arms, like being touched after so long might as well be a fever.  He had it all jumbled up in his head.

But maybe the right order was no order at all.  They didn’t have any kind of before and after, him and Roland.  They just went on and on and on.

“I remembered it,” he said.

“Remembered what?”  He could hear Roland not saying Harris James’s name, like the man cast a dead gray shadow across them.

Wayne didn’t have the words to talk about it, not well, not the way he wants.  “Back when it happened.  I remembered what we did, what we had.”

There was a slight flicker on Roland’s face.  “At the barn?”

Where it shouldn’t have been.  With the trash, with their sins.  He nodded.

“You always acted like you forgot about that.”

“I didn’t.  Not till I started forgetting about everything.  Roland, I’m sorry.”

“I know.”  Roland sat up.  His hair, what there was of it, was flattened down on one side from his pillow.  Wayne could see every Roland he’d ever known there, stacked in like Russian dolls, but this was the one he knew and loved the best, brittle and warm and lasting and there at the end.  Roland said, “It’s not the same, if that’s what you’re thinking.  I don’t hold it against you—whatever you forget now.  If you don’t remember, you don’t remember.  Just because you lied about it before doesn’t mean I think you’re ever lying to me now.  All that—hell, it was a long time ago.”

“Nothing in my life feels that far back,” Wayne said.  “Not far enough back for me to not give a shit.”

“Yeah, you excel at giving more shit than anybody else.  Congratulations.”  Bitter.

Sour as lemon.  _Don’t put too much sugar in,_ Wayne had told him.  Now sugar was all he wanted.  Let them ruin each other for all but the sweetest of things.  What did they have to lose?

“I missed you,” Wayne said softly.  “I guess I figured you should know—know that I know I was lying, too.”  This time asking Roland the question wasn’t easy.  Roland might mind this particular repetition.  “Did we ever kiss?”

Roland’s eyes were less reflective in the dark; Wayne couldn’t read him at all.  He had to grope along, taking everything on faith.  Believing, despite everything they did to each other, that this was where they were supposed to end up.

Roland said, “Yeah.  We did.  You realize I could tell you anything?”

He realized somebody could.  He knew Roland couldn’t, or wouldn’t, but that was a compliment it would feel unforgivable to give him now.  Somehow too bland, too safe, like patting a dog on the head, telling it it’s good and loyal.  This was safe, but was dangerous, too.  They could break each other’s hearts.  They had proof of that.  And Wayne felt broken a lot of the time now anyway—but less and less with Roland, who was repetition, who was home.

That was what he felt, maybe.  Not safe.  Just whole.

And _now_ , he felt _now_.  Felt both this moment and the always of it.

Wayne was past talking.  He went to where Roland was and he sat down beside him.  He put his hand on Roland’s cheek, and if he’d done this before, he didn’t remember it.  He liked the way it made Roland close his eyes for a second, long lashes dropping down.  Wayne leaned in and kissed him.

And if things between them hadn’t always been easy, Roland always had been, at least when it came to this—he’d box up pain but he’d never stint on showing pleasure.  All those years of loneliness came through in how he kissed Wayne back.  Then again, that kind of crackle had been there with them from the start, whatever the cause.

But now—now Roland pressed against him, gave and took whatever he could, and Wayne touched him wherever he could reach to make up for all that time without.  He slid his hands down Roland’s thighs.

“Goddamn,” Roland said against Wayne’s mouth.  “Everything feels new.  You always did this shit to me.”

Wayne felt new himself; he felt young again.

He took Roland in his mouth.  If you could miss something you never knew, or didn’t know you ever knew, he had missed this, the taste of him.

Afterwards, they lay still.

Roland said, “You gonna forget this again?”  His voice, despite everything, was kind; he was stroking Wayne’s shoulder as he asked the question, and by the look on his face, he was thinking he could make this be enough.  People had lived on less.

“Less of a chance of that,” Wayne said, “if you let me sleep in here with you.  And we wake up together.”

Roland dug his fingers in, holding him tighter, closer.  “I could do that.”

“If I forget, I’m not lying.  If I forget, fucking remind me.”

Roland said, “I can do that too,” and he ran his thumb along Wayne’s jawline, cautiously, tenderly.  Feeling the solidity of him, the persistence of body through time.

_1980_

 

Roland was still on the sofa, leaning back, his head touching the wall.  Bum leg stretched out in front of him.

That time out in ’79, the time Wayne didn’t think about, Roland had smelled like hay.  There wasn’t anything natural on him now.  He had that hospital smell, disinfectant and stale air.  It didn’t suit him.

Roland opened his eyes.  “What?”

“I thought I could get that funk off you,” Wayne said, before he could regret it.

“The death smell,” Roland drawled.  “Yeah, man, it’d be a treat to feel fucking clean again without strapping a trash bag to my leg or anything like that.  I’m beat and I don’t want to drag myself to the shower at all.  But I don’t want you dumping cold water on my head.”

“I’ll be gentle.”

“Good.  It’ll be my first time, you know.”

“You’re making a lot of jokes tonight about fucking,” Wayne said.  He left the comment there a while, going to the bathroom to dig up a washrag and some soap, run some water into a bowl he’d brought from the kitchen.  He stood there, his thumbnail digging a crescent shape in the bright green underside of the bar of Irish Spring.  He didn’t know why he was pushing it.  Why he’d chosen tonight of all nights to kick up a fuss about what he thought Roland maybe wanted.

_But then there’s your romantic side._

It was because of him seeing Roland on the ground back at Woodard’s place, he guessed.  Blood spreading out beneath him like that damp spot on Roland’s magazine.

Wayne was the better shot.  Better hunter, always good at running a man to ground.  He should have gotten to Woodard sooner.  Roland’s blood as red as Will Purcell’s backpack.  Yeah, he was good with a metaphor; he could have been a little better sniffing Woodard out before that posse had set him off.

He had thought plenty, since the barn, about what it was like not to have Roland.  Before Woodard’s, he hadn’t thought about what it’d be like to lose him.

“Purple?  You go up Jack and Jill’s hill for that water?”

Wayne went back.  “You’re pretty mouthy for a man who says he doesn’t want a bucket over his head.”

“Now I’m just trying to think of a way to turn that around to fucking,” Roland said.  There was a funny kind of sharpness to his eyes, like they’d gotten little glittering points to them.  “Since I’ve been doing that and I don’t see any need to go breaking a streak.”

Wayne turned the rag over and over in the water and then soaped it up.  “No reason to, no.”

He reached around and slid the cloth across the back of Roland’s neck, rubbed Roland’s own clean scent back into his skin, made him natural again.

Roland said, “I guess you came close to saying I have a pretty mouth.  That’s something.  What are you doing here, Purple?”

“Helping you with inconvenient shit while you’re still all fucked up.”

“No.  You know what I mean.  _This_.”

Yeah, he knew.  Like hell he would have done this with anybody else, any other time.  They were in some kind of game of chicken, pushing more and more at each other until somebody gave.  And he was the one making it happen.  He was trying to reach through time to scrub away at Roland’s blood, Woodard’s blood too late on his own floor.  He had fucked it all up.  He was trying to get at the times Roland had given him some oblique confession he had pulled away from.

But he didn’t know what to do about any of that.  So he just kept on rubbing the back of Roland’s neck with that washrag, making Roland familiar to him again.  He ran it up through the short spiky ends of Roland’s hair.

He said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“All right,” Roland said.  He closed his eyes again.  “Let’s just pretend you’re stupid.  You ain’t that convincing at it, but we can try.”

He gently combed his fingers through those wet strands of hair.  They’d dry stiff and strange, soaped up like that without enough to rinse them.  “I didn’t know what to do with myself, waiting to hear how you were.  I should have cracked Woodard sooner.  Just didn’t get the vibe off him, I suppose.”

“ _We_ , you arrogant son-of-a-bitch.”  Roland grabbed his wrist.  His eyes were steady and surprisingly calm—especially for a man who was being cockteased, Wayne supposed, if he was gonna get brutally honest about it.  “I’m your partner, not Robin to your fucking Batman.  _We_ should have nabbed Woodard sooner, and we didn’t, and I did get lucky, if you look at it the right way.  I’m alive, in case you haven’t noticed.  I mean, you’re sure as hell treating me like your dead best friend.  And I don’t even know that I _am_ your best friend, which makes it even weirder.  This is weird, Purple.”

Answering that last bit was too easy and too hard at the same time.  Friend wasn’t the half of it.  Fuck it.  He kept his hand where it was; lowered his head down.  Met Roland’s mouth with his, more softly than he’d meant to.

Whenever he’d been able to think about it, which had never been always, he’d imagined if this happened again it would be messy and straight to the point, the way it had been out at the barn.  A screw.  This wasn’t that.  They hadn’t kissed before.  He’d never kissed a man before at all.

Roland’s mouth was warm, his lips chapped.  He didn’t leave Wayne with any doubts as to him reciprocating, even though the painkillers had made him a little clumsy.  He groaned as he put weight on his leg, shifting forwards to get further up into Wayne’s mouth.

“That’s good,” Roland said, his voice thick.  “I like you playing Florence Nightingale.”

 

_2019_

 

They were in bed together.  The bed was different from how he remembered it: different pattern on the quilt.  A jumble of his things and Roland’s on the dresser.

It was always a strain to come back to being where he was when he’d been going through the cellar of his mind trying to remember where he’d been.  But he had found something he’d thought he’d lost, and he felt good about that.  He’d come up with the date and the origins of the quilt later, if he decided he even gave a shit.

Roland said, “You got that look.”

Wayne was thinking about the smell of hay, hay and Irish Spring soap, all those years ago.  He said, “I have to go write something down,” and got out of bed and went to the study.  He took out one of his little notebooks and scribbled in it.  An old man reliving a first kiss.  He left the book there and went back into Roland.

They bought Ivory soap now.  Roland smelled like ginger and clean linen.  He was almost tempted to get up and write that, too, but he didn’t; he settled back down into the bed.

Roland’s arm stole around him, his hand resting against Wayne’s stomach.

“I’ve been getting soft around the middle the last few years,” Wayne said.

“Yeah, join the damn club.  Anyway, I’ve been spoiling you with good cooking.  Making a case for my free room and board, outside of various sexual services.”

Wayne chuckled.  “What’s my look?  What did you mean?”

“You had your remembering look.  Like something was on your mind.”

“It came back to me,” Wayne said.  “What happened when I was looking after you, that first night after you came back from the hospital, all laid up with your leg.”

“Yeah.”  Roland sounded fond.  “You seduced me.”

“I don’t remember what came after it, though.”

Roland smoothed Wayne’s T-shirt down.  He could feel Roland following the lines of his ribs.  “You took care of me.”

He knew the answer couldn’t be that simple, that short.  But he was willing to let Roland elide the truth, when it amounted, in the end, to the same thing, to the two of them here together, taking care.  Their story was familiar to him.  He’d keep the details wherever he could, but sometimes, he thought, the outline was enough to see you through.


End file.
